I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 "digests". Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.
FeedDigest's value proposition to users is based purely on providing the back-end infrastructure for remixing. There is an echeloned fee structure ranging from free to $200 annually. The capacities at $50 and $200/year make it possible to imagine reselling the service. As such, FeedDigest seems to be segmenting the market into alpha geek early adopters and professional web developers. In many ways, I think professional web developers would find the service a godsend; it almost completely removes the pain of incorporating syndicated content into a site design.
It's apparent to me that there are two markets FeedDigest is not serving:
- The every day user who wants to create a daily feed newspaper that he or she can share with friends or a small community. The tools requires too much knowledge of how to integrate FeedDigest's outputs into a web page.
- The designer out to create a community space based on remixed feeds. The main issue here is that there is no archiving or content management. With FeedDigest, things like the tag cloud we developed for the Learning Remix site just would not be possible.
I suspect there's room in the market place for a typepad that does remixing. That is, something simple to use at a fee structure that opens it to the mass market.
Check out an interview I had with Peter last month...he has some very interesting plans for the future!